Keyword: Ensure Effectiveness

Effectiveness is a word that I have been tossing around my head for some time now. It started with my post a few weeks ago about Using Twitter for Higher Ed. I posted about trying to figure out a way to put Twitter to good use for higher education. It’s an excellent tool to keep up to date on what my friends and co-workers are doing as well as networking with other electronic media professionals, and while I think it would bee a useful tool for students to be able to use, it brings up the question of would they really use it.

Sometime before my post, Matt Herzberger posted on <uwebd> asking “Do You Twitter?” which has since sparked quite a bit of conversation. If you read through the comments (primarily page 3) there is a debate between Patrick Berry, Brad Ward, and myself about why Twitter would/not be good for a university. Hearing what they had to say was very enlightening. As great a tool as Twitter is, I started asking myself, will integrating this service actually be effective? Would the students even use it? Would they understand how to use it? I am in a unique position on my campus to be able to try any and every new social media technology that comes out. I have signed up for so many of them that I have a two page list of logins that I use. Most are the same, but some sites don’t like the syntax of a password, etc, so they are slight variations. Plus there are some that I have signed up for before I became a professional and so on. But if we were to use all of these services, we would never be able to get any work done.

That being said, I thought Twitter had some real promise, and I think it still does. And recently I found out that we will be searching for a new chat service as well as a message board service. And here’s the catch; it has to be free or cheap. In my other post I detail more about how I think we can use it as a chat feature. But I wonder, would the students really take advantage of it? I have no problem monitoring it and can set it up so that I get a text anytime someone posts, but would the students actually go through the process of signing up and posting a question? Would they understand the 140 character limit? So looking at it further tells me that maybe that’s not the best service to use. We may try it out, but I’m still debating whether it’s worth it.

And Twitter is just one example. Is it worth it to have a presence on Facebook or MySpace? Of course! What about posting photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube? There is a definite value here! What about lifecasting through uStream.tv or other video service? I think if you can pull it off well, then yes. But what about del.icio.us, Google Earth (technically not a social networking site - but maybe not a needed feature), SecondLife, etc? These may be some extra features we could do without. It’s good to push the envelope, but when you’re trying to recruit students, evaluating the effectiveness of your methods is extremely important. If you’re doing all this extra work, then you’re not following the rules of “The Four Hour Workweek.“

In my spare time.

**WE ARE LIVE**  It took a couple of days, but now we are officially LIVE in Google Earth!  Check it out by downloading Google Earth 4 and fly to “1 University Dr, Springfield, IL” and we will be there!  Make sure you enable 3D Buildings as well in the lower left hand “Layers” box.

**My Jing account only has 1GB of bandwidth that apparently I reached after 5 views yesterday…I’m going to work on fixing that today, but if you cannot view the video, my apologies.**

I’ve had something lately that I haven’t really had for a while: spare time. I’ve decided that I wanted to put some of that time to good use. I stumbled across a video on YouTube about the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.

So I thought, why not do that for my campus?! I really enjoyed my 3D design class, so I told myself, “Self, you’re gonna do this!” I went to Google Earth to figure out what to do. They have a program called Google Sketchup which I downloaded, and after a couple days of testing and trying to figure it out, I was able to construct something that I thought looked pretty good. Watch the video below that I made using a service called Jing, something I had forgotten I was able to get. @Joe, Jing allows me to do screen captures for free! *Shakes head…

For now, I cannot embed my screencast video. Click here to view the screencast of my Google Earth Video.

I plan to be able to complete all the buildings within a month or two (it took me about 4 days to do UHB). It may not be a very widely used service, but I think some students will enjoy going in and playing around with it. Plus, it gives our online population the ability to see our campus without having to actually travel here. 2D photos can only do so much. So go download Google Earth and type in our address “1 University Plaza, Springfield, IL” and play around with it. Let me know what you think!